Reply to post: Big fines are just a cost of doing big business

Big fines are just a cost of doing big business

As always, the bureaucrats focus on monetary fines.

A more effective sanction would be to freeze important elements of their commercial activity. For example, work out the penalty, but rather than extract it in cash, impose (for example) a ban on new customer sign up or new product sales to create a similar financial impact. It's much more embarrassing for the offending companies to have sales call centres "frozen", or explaining to prospective customers that they're legally prevented from doing business for a period. Another alternative in this case would be to prohibit commercial data transfers into Google for a given date range, creating a hole in their time series data aggregation (including a ban on "backfilling" the gap in future).